One's For Sorrow
by Rebecca Hb
Summary: After he escapes from Azula, Long Feng makes his way to someplace no one will find him. Introspection-fic.


**One's for Sorrow**

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Street lamps were few and far between in this part of the Middle Ring, and Long Feng refused to draw attention to himself by carrying a light. He shuffled through back-alleys, package under one arm, feet never quite leaving the ground. Earthsight had always been one of his less practiced abilities, but it was better than nothing. Especially when it came to sensing other earthbenders.

The shrine was still where he remembered it. The darkness was a blessing - seeing the way would have confused him, but his feet could still walk the route he'd used as a child. Through a maze of backstreets around the fourth gate between the Middle and Lower Rings, a cut through a half-abandoned warehouse, and a duck through shutters still bearing a worn symbol of plague.

Inside, he picked his way through abandoned rooms. He heard the soft sounds of others scurrying out of his way, could see the faint shadow of their movement in the dark. He ignored them, and they ignored him as he moved through the house that plague had not touched for more than forty years.

The ancestral shrine at the center of the house did not hold any of its original ancestral relics. He'd removed those long ago, when the Dai Li first took him on as a trainee and he had a safe place to keep them. They were safe no longer, but he doubted Azula would recognize the significance of the items in the small shrine inside his palace apartments.

They had no significance. He had lost his family when he was almost six years old. The incense he burned, the flowers and jade he left, the rice he set out, the hours he devoted to keeping the little shrine clean and bright were merely part of the forms of being a minister. His enemies could not accuse him of not knowing and fulfilling his filial duty.

He knelt and spread the package on the floor. By feel, he picked out the tiny candles and spark-rocks. He lit them and set them before the statuette of Avatar Kyoshi. Bahn had dared him to steal it when he was eleven, and Long Feng knew the rich trader he'd stolen it from had never missed it. Worn granite of a dead Avatar? The only possible buyers were the university and the Dai Li.

Five years later, Bahn had lost a hand for thievery, Long Feng remembered. It was three days after Thanh chose him for Dai Li training.

He lit four incense sticks from the candles and stabbed them into the floor before the statuette. "You wouldn't have done it this way, Mother."

All Dai Li called Avatar Kyoshi 'mother'.

"But the battles you faced were always with Earth Kings and would-be Earth Kings," he continued. "The Fire Nation has been our enemy. My grandfather never knew a life without the war. My father did not. I have not."

There were three jars he had not yet touched, and he picked one up now. "You know the comet is coming. It came twice in your lifetime, and you know what it does to firebenders."

He dipped his fingers into the white actor's paint and carefully applied it to the statuette's face. In his mind's eyes, he saw the Fire Nation girls and the false warpaint they wore. "They destroyed the airbenders the last time it came, Mother. Now Ba Sing Se is the last great stronghold of the Earth Kingdom. We have withstood them for a hundred years. But the walls failed once."

He drew in a shaky breath. "I know it seems preposterous. Avatar Ying Zhen built the first wall, the one that encircles the Middle Ring now. The Twenty-Seventh Earth King ordered the building of the Lower Ring Wall. The Great Wall was already five hundred years old when you were born. They stood against everything earthbenders threw at them, so how could firebenders get through? That is what people said, until General Iroh's forces _did_ break through. Until the fires burned in our fields."

He dipped a finger in red. "When the comet comes, they'll destroy us." A pause as he sketched the arc of red that rose above the eye. "Unless they already hold Ba Sing Se."

"You wouldn't have done it this way, Mother," he repeated. "But it was the only way."

Just like keeping the war from Kuei was the only way?, he wondered. Just like taking the Avatar's bison was the only way?

He traced the second arc of red. Nothing he did in giving the city to the Fire Nation cost him power in the long-run. It would be his Dai Li who bore the brunt of the accusations of betrayal. He had been arrested on the orders of a spoiled boy-king. When the Fire Nation took hold of Ba Sing Se, people would whisper that he could have held the city.

"They do not have to be separate tasks," he whispered as he scraped a nail into the jar of black. "I can protect the culture of Ba Sing Se and hold onto power. You never asked us to be good men, or you would not have given us to the Forty-Sixth Earth King."

He sketched black over the statuette's face. "I am not a good man, Mother, but I will protect Ba Sing Se."

-**End-**


End file.
